Using Twitter? Don’t follow these F1 fakes

Update: Some of the details below may have changed since this article was published. Refer to the F1 Twitter directory for an up-to-date list of official Twitter accounts for F1 drivers.

World champion Sebastian Vettel is not on Twitter

Twitter is a fantastic resource for getting real-time updates from people in F1 – including the drivers.

But not every driver is on there and some unscrupulous individuals have been quick to exploit that, setting up fake accounts to give false information to hundreds of thousands of people.

I often get asked on Twitter which accounts are fake and which ones are real. Make sure you’ve not been duped by scrubbing these fakes from your follow list and following some real F1 accounts instead.

Fake Sebastian Vettel Twitter accounts

I seem to get asked once a week if F1_Vettel or Sebas_Vettel are real accounts. Neither of them are, a fact which doesn’t seem to have stopped almost 100,000 Twitter users from following them.

Although it would be fantastic to see the reigning world champion on Twitter, sadly he does not seem to have an account so far.

Fake Kimi Raikkonen Twitter account

It would be marvellous to see returning F1 champion Kimi Raikkonen join in on Twitter.

Fake Fernando Alonso Twitter account

How do we know it’s not the real Alonso? Simple: Ferrari won’t let either of their drivers user Twitter.

Despite that being fairly common knowledge there seems to be no shortage of fakers pretending to be the twice-champion: this one had their Twitter account suspended but just a few days ago another one appeared.

Fake Michael Schumacher Twitter account

Despite claiming to be the “personal Twitter profile of Mercedes GP Petronas F1 Team racer, seven-time world champion and a proud ambassador for UNESCO”, it’s pretty clear RealSchumacher is not the genuine article.

Exposing the fakes

At the time of writing all these accounts have been set up to disguise the fact that they are fake. When confronted with their illegitimate status, Twitter fakers often make hasty changes to their accounts declaring that they are “unofficial” or similar.

If these don’t come clean, hopefully Twitter will take action to weed out the impostors.

If you’ve spotted any other Twitter fakers with a substantial following, name them in the comments.

F1 Fanatic maintains a list of hundreds of official F1 Twitter accounts for you to follow, including drivers, teams, team members and more. Find the list here:

It’s the same guy that made the fake di resta page and the fake Bernd Maylander page as well. Someone pointed out to me he copies others tweets, changes like 1-2 characters and posts them as his own, very strange!

But not every driver is on there and some unscrupulous individuals have been quick to exploit that, setting up fake accounts to give false information to hundreds of thousands of people.

That said, there is a small community that openly acknowledges that it is fake (they have names like “FakeFernando”), and they absolutely should be followed, because they’re a parody of the Formula 1 grid. Like this one, from FakeJarnoTrulli:

They’re good for the occasional laugh, especially when they get into (stereotypical) character – Trulli has no idea who he is driving for, Red Bull is a mob-like family, Petrov is usually drunk and can’t do anything without his manager, and Massa won’t say anything until Alonso does.

@prisoner-monkeys Before I followed as many people as I do now my feed was constantly filled with Fake Felipe Massa. Everything was ‘for sure’ this and ‘for sure’ that. In the end I told him to give it a rest and tone it down a bit. He said something to the effect of having to run it by Alonso first. Made me smile a bit.

Not entirely sure if this will be allowed, as I’m not sure if it’s a direct advertisement or not, but my blog is almost 100% comedy, with the added bonus of predicting exactly who would move where on the 27th of last month … Pure luck, or insider knowledge… who knows.

I think you’re doing the right thing by pointing out the fakes that are pretending to be real, but it might also be useful to list the fakes that are openly fake as some of them are very funny! @MarkWibber, @charlie_whiting, @fakebernie, @Emperor_Jean, and @fakemaxmosley are all great. @LewisHamilton is a real account, it just looks like an illiterate 13 year old has hacked into the account sometimes!

@Hairs I know what you mean. I’m trying twitter profesionaly but even only following only 30 accounts amounts to so much gibberish, people tweeting links to things I’ve already seen and poor attempts at humor. I continue my test for 6 months and try to be open, but it’s hard.
Now, I’m not à journalist, so I’d rather have à Nice full story than à 140 character corporate news flash.
And I’ve said before: all important things Will be published online, or even in print…

Occasionally there are also fakes that reveal themselves by being oddly fluent in a language one would not expect that particular driver to know, or have the location written in the profile as a place where the driver in question has never lived…

I love the notion that @AussieGrit could be a corporate PR product. Did you see his response to @NataliePinkham’s question about Spa only being used every other year? “**** idea, stinks”.
Not too mention his very personal pictures and comments.

I unfollowed him when he started publicly flirting with a female F1 journalist. It would have been alright if he didn’t make it so the tweets appeared in the timelines of those who weren’t even following said journalist, but the fact he made it so visible irked me and I gave up on him!

Keith, lighten up a bit.
Some like Kimi’s or speciallly diResta’s are really pretending to be the real one (and that’s quite funny IMO) but it’s easy to find out who’s who these days.
@NandoAlonso, for instance is admittedly fake (it’s even in Portuguese).

Not easy enough, apparently, because I am constantly being asked who is and isn’t fake. And as you can see from some of the earlier comments, there were some people mistakenly following these accounts because they believed they were real.

In the case of the examples above, none of them are the people they claim to be and all of them were hiding that fact when I wrote the article.

Several of them had written posts that were obviously designed to be mistaken for real updates from the people they claim to be. And none of them appeared to be comic or parody accounts.

As I already said in a reply to an earlier comment, I’m aware there are many accounts of the ‘fake-so-and-so’ variety. I’m not objecting to people who make it clear they are fake and run spoof accounts. The accounts described in the article are all people who intended to mislead.

And, as I also said in the article, when confronted with the fact that they are fake they often change what’s written in the account to give the appearance that they always admitted they were fake.

Ferrari have changed their attitude towards Twitter. All their drivers have TT accounts now and they are very active ;). @alo_oficial is the real Fernando Alonso and @Felipe1Massa is real Massa :). Fisichella is also there but he’s not as active as Alonso, Massa or @InsideFerrari